free comic book day is tomorrow!

Free Comic Book Day is a really exciting holiday for me (mainly because of the "free" and the "comic book" components of the equation).  Often times it's official, sanctioned free comics that are handed out from larger publishers, but each year it seems more and more smaller publishers are taking it upon themselves to publish free comics.  This year, Tugboat Press has Runner Runner & Sparkplug Comicbooks, Teenage Dinosaur, Revival House & Floating World Comics released Bad Trip.  

Last year, Sam Sharpe, Erik Schneider and I released a minicomic, Handout Comics,

This year, Sam and I coordinated a second issue of Handout Comics (don't worry, Erik is in this one too!).  We had it offset printed by 1984 Printing in Oakland, and had a rubber stamp made by Lakeview Stamp Company for the title.  But the contents is the exciting part!  We got 11 awesome Chicago-based comics artists to contribute to the comic:

Nate Beaty!

Bernie McGovern!

 Erik Schneider!

 Me!

Beth Hetland!

Ian McDuffie!

Sam Sharpe!

Jeremy Sorese!

Jeremy Tinder!
(who also did the cover!)

 Jeff Zwirek!

Caroline Picard!

They'll be available at the following stores:

Brainstorm Comics 

Challengers Comics & Conversation

Chicago Comics

BOTH Comix Revolution Locations

Evil Squirrel Comics

G-Mart

Quimby's Bookstore

Third Coast Comics

& I sent a handful of copies with my friends from 2D Cloud to TCAF this weekend in Toronto!

So check them out, pick 'em up, they're 100% FREE! Happy Free Comic Book Day! 

free comics! ...in the past. new comics! ...eventually.

Last Saturday was Free Comic Book Day (FCBD (pronounced fick-bud, for you uninitiated (not really))).  Sam Sharpe, Erik Schneider and I put together a free minicomic we put around comic book stores in Chicago (Quimby's, Chicago Comics, Thirdcoast Comics, Challengers). We named it Handout Comics.  We made a stencil cover, for it.  Here are a couple pictures from the process:

 Erik folding the comic's guts!

 Finished copies of the comic (we made 200)!

 Sam cutting the image stencil!

Sam printing the image stencil!

The whole process was a lot of fun, and I hope folks enjoyed the comics!

A while ago, you might have noticed me mentioning the Minicomic of the Month Club.  I won't go into its details, because I've decided to scrap the plan (which was going to commence in June).  There was very little interest (probably due to very little promotion by me), and I myself -while looking forward to the project- was not excited about it.

But on the way back from Stumptown Comics Fest (which will receive a review soon), I started coming up with imagery that was pretty exciting, and slowly -over the course of a few weeks- a story grew, and has stolen most of my free time and wandering mind.  So I'm excited to mention (which I'm sure will back-fire later down the road), I've started working on a minicomic series that will be a lot of fun to draw, and hopefully a lot of fun to read.  It will probably be 5 issues long, and I will hopefully have the first issue done by SPX in September.  Below is one of the initial sparks of the story, the working title of which is the Plot.